Data protection systems are designed to perform operations such as backing up data and restoring data. When accessing a data protection system (e.g., reading or writing), the accesses may demonstrate a pattern. For example, when data is being restored from a backup, the read operations may be highly sequential. Often, a backup is performed by writing data to the data protection system sequentially. The performance of data protection systems can improved by predicting future accesses and loading the appropriate meta-data and/or data ahead of the access. As a result, the access requires less time to perform because the data has already been loaded into a cache or memory when the request for the data arrives.
When the access pattern is less sequential, it becomes more difficult to predict which data will be requested next or in the future. This results in lower cache hit ratios and thus impacts the performance of the data protection system.
In fact, access patterns in data protection systems have become less sequential in part because the data stored in backup systems is no longer viewed as passive data whose only purpose is to be restored if necessary. When the data stored in a data protection system is leveraged, the access patterns become less sequential. To improve performance and to improve the ability to leverage backed up data, systems and methods are needed more accurately identify access patterns and pre-fetch data.